Finally! Food discussions! While working in the rainforest I was living with healthy-dining, mainland-natives so the dining was pretty typical for me (lots of salads!) - felt so familiar I hardly thought to document the experiences. But now that I'm in the city there's too much to discuss! Scroll through the slide shows for some food explorations. :) Also, it would've been quite sensible to save the market discussion for this post - but I didn't. so please see previous post (Sept. 24th) for that commentary. piragua pic from: panoramio.com/photo/5914081
Made it to the beautiful and vibrant city of Viejo San Juan - the steep, alley-carved colonial settlement on a tiny island on PR's north-east coast. Old San Juan is connected to the rest of the city by three bridges and thus the most densely populated center of manufacturing, culture, government and tourism of Puerto Rico. My favorite thing to do is wander the streets and find the quiet secret alleyway streets filled with brightly-painted homes and so much sunshine it blinds you. Mercado Agrícola Natural de Viejo San Juan over my past few weeks of puerto rican dining, i heard repeated struggles to access sustainably produced foods - that locals don't grow it & imports are a rarity. it's a complex issue involving education, wealth, politics and of course, the material capabilities of a small island to support itself. so i was happily surprised to stumble across a small but bustling local, organic foods market nestled into the arched courtyard on the San Juan Museum - on my first day in sj! After an intensely packed three weeks of work + play at the Rainforest Inn in the mountains above Rio Grande, it's now time for this girl to get to a city! At the Inn, I gained first-hand understanding of the material & physical challenges of building and maintaining hospitality landscapes in the rainforest (think mud, mud & more MUD! ). In addition to the manual labor, I hiked my way all over the dense forest hills admiring flora, fauna and lovely, remote swimming holes - my premier escape from the heat! In addition to the culvert project (see previous posts), I did a lot of weeding and plant rearranging. Below, you can see subtle changes to some stair-side planting beds. looks a little tidier, no? As I'm sure you've noticed, I've also had time to experiment with video-making both before and behind the camera. Here's one more creation to summarize my experience @ the Rainforest Inn! ...sorry about the snails...haha, you'll see. ;) If you'd like more info on the Inn, go to rainforestinn.com or follow the links below to official pages.
so here's a choppily cut experiment of me being in front of the camera and rambling about who-knows-what ... haha, i'm not sure how i feel about the position switch! regardless, here are some more rainforest views and aggressive volume changes - enjoy! ;) here's a little update on the culvert project - a range of bromeliads, alocasias, ornamental pineapples and more have been planted in the earth surrounding and atop the infamous culvert. i laid down weed cloth, mixed in more compost and coated the bed with pine mulch per laurie's request. the tricky part's getting the mulch to cooperate with the slopes of the berm and obey my wishes over gravity's! a difficulty of the plant-shopping process here is the scarcity of information and the presentation of irrelevant information. we purchased plants from the local home depot and walmart because laurie felt their quality exceeded the local nurseries'. however, we were met with a range of tropical species with either no descriptive labels or irrelevant markings (these were either marketed as houseplants or for the (less intense) southern mainland heat). unfortunately, although i bought plants for their 'sol' labels, they were not a match for the hot puerto rican sun - several bleached in days. similarly, there seems to be an information bias on the web. while doing research in order to acquaint my mind with tropical plants - many websites discussed these species for a northern audience looking to spruce up their indoors...and information for caribbean gardening was scarce. not so helpful for us gardeners in puerto rico! anyways, i feel as though i sufficiently disguised the culvert - and thus fulfilled our main objective! what do you think?
well i've been postponing giving an update on my important culvert project (see sept. 6th post for intro) primarily because a series of small obstacles have repeatedly halted work and really thrown off my momentum! bedmakingwhen we left off, a thin lid of steel-reinforced concrete was poured and left to cure atop the cinder-block inlet. the next goal was to haul and mix different quantities of sand, mud and organic matter to form some life-sustaining, homemade soils. a wheelbarrow was essential for moving materials from their individual piles scattered about the property...not to mention the calories required to push it and some serious quantities of bug spray... process slideshow: septic challengeswhile my soils were piling outside, a conflict was building in the septic system: an upstairs toilet was not flushing correctly and the cause could not be ascertained. while hunting for answers, bill remembered a toilet vent was once located under the area i had just buried in earth. he wanted it cleared so the system could function again. the problem was: his foggy memory of the pipe's whereabouts. so he pointed, one visit at a time to a different area of the yard...and i dug. i dug all over the place. many hours and four wrong pipes later, the yard was thoroughly excavated but the vent was never found. all i know for certain is, it's nowhere within the realms of my project, so onwards! a quick disassemble?since we poured the concrete slab a few days ago, it was time to pop the frame apart and set it to rest on the inlet. this seemingly simple part of the slab-making process, was complicated by the quality of the frame itself - it was set to sustain a hurricane! you see, it's a difficult thing to work with a stranger in a field in which you have little experience. in this instance, i let bill take the lead on construction and was not involved in assembling the temporary frame. so when it was time to pull it apart, i found a prohibitively sturdy frame with over 25 3" screws buried deep into the wood strips. looking back, i think bill was on construction auto-pilot and did not consider the disassembly phase when he built the frame and i am certainly ignorant of most construction norms and techniques - couldn't easily find a remedy. this was very frustrating, for one because it created much more work for me (!) and more importantly, because it could have been easily avoided with better communication and forethought. in the end, (another volunteer) mike and i went to great lengths to loosen and pry the stripped screws and wood beams off - without chipping the concrete too much. it was all sorts of crazy, but i'm glad it's done. process slideshow: the temporal shifts of the rainforest confuses my northeast-urban-raised mind. you see at home, there's a point in every night when the birds quiet down, the bees take rest and the squirrels cease doing whatever frollicky thing they seem to do. the night quiets, leaving the soft buzzing of a few bugs and maybe a racoon rustling in a trashcan somewhere. its not until sunrise when their calls return to liven up the day again. however, the rainforest presents many waves of sounds and movements. here, the 'quiet' is more pronounced during the sunlight hours. later, surges of frogs, insects and birds usher in the falling sun until - by the time the sky's completely dark - you are surrounded by a cacophony of chirping, buzzing, humming, crying, singing creatures - forever flowing around you, remaining mostly unseen. it was very hard to sleep at first, with all this clamor, especially when new sounds are introduced everynight. in fact, i finally learned that the tarzan calls i've heard nightly are (unfortunately) not the cries of a lost-primate-raised-wild-man but the múcaro or puerto rican screech owl! regardless, these calls slowly form the comforting soundtrack of the rainforest night with coqui frogs introducing everyday's evening and finally giving permission to rest. i hoped to include a simple audio loop of rainforest sounds for you to experience, but unfortunately weebly would charge extra money for that - so here are some nighttime sounds with classy filler video - enjoy! ;) night bloomsused some free time this morning to hike through some unmanaged rainforest on the property. it's hard to relay through still and moving images how dense and illegible the forest is. thick layers of ferns, moss and vines form webs around young and grown trees. the ground is an undulating mess of mud, roots and fallen palm leaves. the air smells damp with decomposing leaves and flowing streams. swarms of insects, birds and frogs make a continuous buzz. it's beautiful and overwhelming, hard to take in while you're moving through it (and eating spiderwebs) but much more digestible when sitting streamside with your feet in the water, relaaaxing -hey, it's sunday! :) this video summarizes the predominant experience of my feet during the hike ;) don't sliiip! el yunque's categorization as a 'subtropical rainforest' should have given it away, but i'm still struggling to understand how much it rains here. as i mentioned previously, bill & laurie assigned me a landscaping project in exchange for room and board. The challenge is to mask an unsightly culvert inlet (seen below) while maintaining its functionality as an essential hurricane drain. so laurie and i did some drawings, made some plans and are now aiming to cover the inlet, make a tiered planting display for atop it and surround the area with beds of resilient tropical plants. now, to work! reinforced concrete construction 101 |
AuthorAn Upstate New York-grown, art history + Italian major turned organic farm volunteer turned Home Health Aide turned Landscape Architecture Grad student currently adventuring about the globe and taking far too many photos for one travel blog to handle. Archives
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